CONTROVERSIAL neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero – the doctor plotting the world’s first head transplant – has claimed to have successfully severed and reconnected the spinal cord of nine mice.
The development could have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks for head transplants.

Dr Canavero and a team of Chinese doctors severed the spinal cords of 15 rats, and attempted to reattach nine of them, with the other six as test subjects.

The team used polyethylene glycol, which is found in medicines but also industrial processes, to fix the spinal cords, while attempting to minimise blood loss.

All of the rats, bar one, managed to survive for an astonishing 30 days after the experiment, according to the report in the journal CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics.

The rats even managed to walk again and regain basic motor functionality, while the researchers said two of the rodents returned to a state of being “basically normal”.

However, the team note the spinal cord severance needs to be extremely clean for the procedure to work.

The report reads: “We show for the first time in an adequately powered study that the paralysis attendant to a complete transection of the spinal cord can be reversed.”

The doctors will now work their way up to humans, saying that the next operations being dogs, with humans down the line.

Dr Canavero and his colleague Xiaoping Ren from the Harbin Medical University in China have previously claimed plan to perform a head transplant on terminally ill computer scientist Valery Spiridonov by the end of the year.

The 31-year old Russian volunteered for the controversial surgery as he says he wants the chance of a new body before a disease known as Werdnig-Hoffman claims his life.